Legendary Atlanta music producer Jermaine Dupri has finally spoken out about the wild rumor that fellow mogul Jay-Z told him to turn down the NFL deal that Jay later accepted.

Dupri said during an interview on V-103’s “The Big Tigger Show” that Jay-Z never told him to turn down the deal with the NFL. Dupri said that the tremendous backlash he received for putting on free concerts during the week of the 2019 Super Bowl in Atlanta convinced him to “step back” from the NFL on his own.

But Dupri reiterated Jay-Z did not advise him to stop negotiating with or working with NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell.

“We never had a conversation where [Jay-Z] told me ‘don’t do what you’re doing’,” Dupri declared emphatically. “That never happened.

Dupri added that when Jay-Z did call him, the conversation “was that ‘you know what side I’m on. I understand what you’re doing.’ That’s what the conversation was.”

The longtime hitmaker, born Jermaine Dupri Mauldin, said he had never faced backlash like that he experienced just for putting on free concerts in Centennial Olympic Park during the 2019 Super Bowl in Atlanta. He wasn’t even a part of the Super Bowl halftime show that took place inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium. He told Big Tigger that people were “killing him” and calling him a “sucker,” a “sellout” and accused him of taking “blood money” for entering into an agreeement with the NFL to put on the free concerts.

As rolling out previously reported, Jay-Z has been slammed nationwide for appearing at a press conference with Goddell to announce that he’d entered into an agreement to manage Super Bowl halftime shows and other forms of entertainment, as well as to work on addressing players’ concerns about inequality.

The matter exploded this past weekend when Dupri’s colleague Bryan Michael Cox went on his weekly podcast and wrongly said that Jay-Z’s call to Dupri was to convince him not to enter into any deal with the NFL. JD reiterated that no one told him to step away.

In fact, Dupri supports Jay-Z and Roc Nation entering into a deal with the NFL and he explains why below.

Check out the interview on “The Big Tigger Show” that featured Dupri and Cox:

A military veteran and Buckeye State native, I've written for the likes of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Business Chronicle and the Detroit Free Press. I'm a lover of words, photography, books, travel, animals and The Ohio State Buckeyes. #GoBucks